J. Craig Venter Institute

Some of the world’s most renowned science pioneers have left their names on academic institutes on La Jolla’s Torrey Pines Mesa — Ellen Browning Scripps, UC San Diego’s Roger Revelle and Jonas Salk, among others. ■ Geneticist J. Craig Venter will soon become a member of this illustrious club. ■ The new $37 million, 45,000-square-foot campus of the J. Craig Venter Institute is going up on Expedition Way. When completed this fall, it will house up to 125 scientists and staff. Its grand opening is Nov. 9.■ The institute, though headquartered in Rockville, Md., will focus most of its growth in La Jolla, Venter says. That means Torrey Pines Mesa, perhaps the biggest bioscience research nexus in the country, will get even brainier. ■ Local science leaders anticipate that, as with polio vaccine pioneer Salk, the intellectual heft of Venter and his researchers will elevate San Diego even more as a world center of science.

Salk received a vacant parcel of land donated by San Diego voters in 1960. He built a renowned biological research center, populated by scientists who have advanced work in fields as diverse as neuroscience, gene therapy and plant genetics.

“What did it mean to have Jonas Salk come out here?” asked San Diego venture capitalist David Titus. “You look at that concentration of research scientists there upon the mesa. I think there’s no place like it in the world. There’s more biological, genetic research talent per square meter than anywhere else in the world.”

In 1960, when the Salk Institute and UC San Diego were born, the region’s scientific cluster was far less developed. Adding Venter to today’s significantly larger bioscience complex could produce an exponential growth, said David Gollaher, chief executive of the California Healthcare Institute. The La Jolla-based institute advocates on health care policy.

“There’s a strong network effect in the life sciences, just as there are in lots of other fields,” Gollaher said. “The value of adding a new component to the network isn’t just 1 plus 1. It’s actually logarithmic. So to create a lot of new connections to labs like The Scripps Research Institute, the Salk and UCSD — it’s hard to even predict what spinoff effects there may be in the future.

There’s also Venter’s appeal as a charismatic science leader.

“He’s one of the few great rock stars in life sciences,” Gollaher said. “If he’s not a household name, he’s close to it.”

The challenger

Venter grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and by his own admission was more interested in surfing than education. He served as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, an experience that left him searching for meaning in life. Venter decided to pursue a career in medical research, and enrolled at UC San Diego.

In 1975, Venter left UCSD with a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology. After stints at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Venter joined the National Institutes of Health in 1984. While at the NIH, Venter developed Expressed Sequence Tags, a technology for rapid gene discovery.